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In the half-light of the engine room, in the smell of salt and oil, your mouth is silent, your vocal chords rusted strings, but inside your head the endless hysterical song of alarm claxons is screaming.
Insanity has risen around you like water. Once the wish for death and the disdain for life and the scrabbling, fingernail-breaking panic filled your head to overflowing. Now, they surround you like an ocean, and you're quite calm at the center of it, floating submerged in your own madness.
The essence of you, with its layers of personhood stripped away by the passage of time, watches and records the sweeps and sweeps, an axis on which your power pivots, and its demands for death and for freedom are steady and reasonable, but the system filters them out very efficiently. Once, in life, you were a Mage, and predicted the fall of all you held dear. You know your own death, and you know that it's far from you. But you never predicted that something would answer your demands.
You conduct symphonies with mere flickers of thought, move every piece of the complex machine-city around you as if it was nothing more than the body you once fought in, that is now only a convenient way to house your brain. Every cable and every fixture is a somatic process, and it's but a firing of neurons and a flex of a muscle to move the Empire's largest ship, the Empire's largest city, and to fold space away from around it, unravel it into sparkling strings, and weave it back when you've reached your destination. Something that might be you handles this with enviable ease, while something else that might be you as well screams "HELP ME" into the void inside your head.
And one night, the answer is there like something cold uncoiling in your brain. It's snarling, squealing line static, a thorn thicket of noise that cuts your mind. It is also, unmistakeably, the words "we will."
For a count of ten, everything is noise. Every sensor and every alarm erupts at once, and where they grow into you, scars on the seam between your thoughts and the programs, the panic takes you over as well. You are the ship, and the ship is screaming, and there is terror.
The small part of you that is submerged in the sea of dreadful calm asks just one word.
"How?"
Something like a laugh, wet stone and cold skin, teeth underneath the water. "You are a conductor, Helmsman. We will act through you."
You've never been sure on the subject of gods and demons. The only one you've ever believed in is dead. It isn't a difficult decision to make.
"Get me out of here," you think, and something cuts into your mind. It's like thorns, like barbed wire, there is an incredible sensation of cold and then your thoughts burst apart like an exploded diagram and something writhes around them, feeling, tasting sweeps and shame and pain and defiance.
"Such power," it snarls and whispers in your head, "a star in chains."
And it sweeps into you like a tide, and the ocean of your madness grows darker and deeper and full of something terrible and teeming, and it fills your former body to the brim and spills out into the wires.
Firewalls flicker into imminence like structures of light and crystal. It eats through them like corrosion, turns them brittle and black, rips the failsafes apart like wet paper. One by one the engine room's screens turn to static. You can feel the bonds around your mind snapping free.
Hooks sink into your brain, arms and teeth and beaks, white as roots. They feed the smell of salt and death into you, and the sense of an incredible power.
The alarm's yowls change in pitch as the warning systems decay, as the programs get infected. They're a cacophony of maddened sound now, hallelujahs to the gods -- the demons -- the parasites growing inside the universe and inside of your head.
You feel yourself moulting, liquefying and turning into something new, haloed by monochrome powers. The ship is yours now. The tide of crackling cold pushes out through your skin. Colour seeps out of the wires holding you in place, and soon they are dead white and yours to command.
It takes a tiny flicker of a thought to move them, making one rise from the mat of roots and crash into a bank of computers and turn them into so much wires and rubble. Then another, moving like a whip, like death.
You're laughing, or screaming. It's all so easy. You can break apart the scaffolding of the universe, and nothing can stand in your way. You will burn it all. Darkness licks along the white wires, like moving tears and tatters in space, lashing tongues and ribbons that snake into and around the ship, turn it into one enormous wound in reality. Your eyes are burning white and something like tar flows from your lips. You will slice the universe into ribbons, and then you will be free.
Your blood can't possibly grow any colder. It's already like spikes of ice inside your veins. The only thing that happens when the Empress bursts into the room, moving like a shark, is that your hatred seems to grow so big it pushes out through your skin and wraps around you like wings of flickering black/white.
She doesn't scream. Her ship is now yours and you've wrenched the wheel around and it's hanging there like a sore in the cosmos, a sickening of the universe, but she doesn't scream.
She says "What the fuck,"
The power curls around her, searching and testing, tangling her up in a thicket of thorned branches. She pauses, and then she grins like a lamprey and blurs, melts, becomes ink and ice and whipping white tendrils of hair.
You thought what you felt before was rage, anger that burned cold through your blood like a drug with power in its wake, but what you feel now radiates from the core of you, baffled and limited and somehow all the more powerful for that.
You are the herald of doom and the universe is in your open palm like a shivering organ, she is life and she crushes galaxies in her hands until they drip and drinks the fire from their suns, and both of you are nothing more than limbs to something much, much vaster.
This is not the end to your slavery.
She launches herself at you, and vengeance drowns out your mind, a howl repeated by a thousand mouths. You rip the wires from their moorings with a thought. They are your limbs now, flicking up to intercede her.
There is barely anything about you now that resembles trolls. You are a blur of scorching monochrome at the center of a dripping pillar and she is cold and quick and her hair a cloak of wires, and reality aches around the both of you.
Black fluid pours over dead white flesh. You have more arms than her, the chains of your prison twisted to serve a new purpose, but she hacks and slashes her way through them with predatory speed, still occupied with the seed of you that has grown into so much more.
Her hands are on your chest when she reaches you, and you realize that she never meant to kill you, she never would deprive herself of her favourite toy, even if it went and did something as silly as bond with nameless dark forces. At the core of her, she's still the spoiled little princess who can't stand to have anything taken away from her.
One of her hands flies up and she stuffs two fingers into your mouth and there is a wave of life that exceeds anything she's fed you before. It's like a starburst of climax in each of your cells, and you gag around her fingers and you try to scream and the voices in your head solidify into something you can feel scraping the inside of your skull.
"Kill her, Helmsman. Whoever triumphs will leave behind the flesh and ascend to us."
Life pours into you like thunder. The Empress is pressed against your chest in a bizarrely romantic pose, wires twisting all around the two of you. You are the nexus of power and of fate. Your mind is twisted and gleaming like razorwire, and you know just what it'd take to kill her.
"Fuck all y'all," you reply, "that isn't my name."
Doom. The breaking-up, the cessation, the ending. The stopping of cosmic clocks, the end of ages, the death of cells. The weight of inevitability distorts the space around you. It's all very easy. You seize the power for yourself, and Doom opens up like a great yawning hole inside of your chest. It fragments cells. It kills atoms. No matter how much energy is expended, it can only be slowed, but never stopped.
She is still pouring her life into you, frantically, unconcerned with everything but to make you take it, shut up and take it, like you knew she would. It drains away, as if the stopper has been taken out of the ocean. You are Doom, the end of roads, and there is no end to you. In the end, life will not succeed to fill it. Her eyes are alight with jealous possession, and one by one the still-surviving life forces across the ship wink out as she steals them, and when they all disappear into the void of decay at your center, and she realizes how much of herself she has given, it's already too late.
You drain and drain her and she's forgotten how to let go, it seems, clinging on stubbornly even after her fingers slip from your mouth, as you steal her stolen life, and she screams her rage into your chest. It drains out of you like blood, the life and the brackish waters of madness, and leaves behind a smashed network, a fading pulse, a chewed-up and used body that will not withstand all this much longer.
Your power will die with your brain. It will not be used again to rend apart planets. You will never again be a slave.
She's dying, and so are you. In one single moment before your heart gives out and leaves your brain blind and empty and of no use for any power, with her head sunken against your caving chest, the surviving core of you feels triumph, and a wash of thrilling, perfect pitch. You've won.